Month: September 2019

Welcoming Fall

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Things have been quiet in the office lately. I’m finally caught up, press date has passed. This is the month of the year when I can take a few days off, even a week, and not have a single email in my inbox when I return. I love this time of year. But this month is especially quiet because two coworkers in my department have left in the past two weeks, three in the past two months. And none of them have been replaced yet. We aren’t sure when they might be. 

I feel myself drawing inward. I lean into the quiet, wrap myself in the soft sunshine and hush as I plod along at my work, struggling to motivate myself. I know that any day we could learn there will be a new coworker joining us, and we will gasp into urgent preparations for their arrival, but for now we have no news and no known timeline. 

In fall and winter, I make fewer plans, spend more time reading and crocheting and writing. I emphasize coziness. I light candles. I’ve talked about this before and I don’t want to harp, but I don’t remember my tendency toward drawing inward starting quite this early before. I assume it’s the silence. Like when an unseasonal cold snap sends the trees into color early, though temperatures rise again. 

I spent a little time going through out holiday decoration boxes last week to pull out our fall decorations. I wanted my parent, who visited last weekend, to see them. I’m also just ready for that change. I’m ready for my favorite season. 

I kneeled in the closet under the stairs, opening boxes, listening to Tara scrabble at the underside of the door to try to get to me. I found and stacked the Halloween-specific decorations for Oct. 1 but went ahead and set up the more general fall decorations: ceramic and crocheted pumpkins, the wreath, the welcome mat, a painting. I’ve also bought a few more decorative pumpkins, including one for my desk at work. I recently painted a somewhat Dali-esque pumpkin scene at a local art studio, which leans against the wall on the breakfast bar. I placed the fall decorations around the house and continued to wonder what I should do with all my candles. 

Yesterday, I took the day off and planned to do nothing but put books on my new shelves, bought and brought by my beloved parents. However, I had a headache most of the day, so lay on the sofa and watched Moana. I didn’t even feel up to pulling up Netflix until well into the afternoon. I played with the cat and let her sleep on me. I ate very, very badly. I didn’t read, didn’t plan, and would maybe put two or three handfuls of books on a shelf before I retreated back to the sofa. 

I’m looking forward to experiencing a new season in our new house. I’m excited to continue to decorate for the season, we’ve now officially entered. But I’m also down this year. Not sad exactly. Not depressed. Maybe my headaches are because of an allergen or the seasons changing. I do feel withdrawn, especially at work. Until things get better, so I’m going to enjoy some sunshine. 

Summer Reading, 2019 – Romance

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Within the last month, both of my best friends at work (who are also very good friends outside of work) took other jobs and moved away. Several other coworkers, all on whom I get along with and have worked with for years, have also left the company this summer. In no small part because of this upheaval, I’ve found myself voraciously reading my comfort genre of romance. 

Here’s a list of some of my favorite romance reads from the summer.

Upcoming romances I’m excited about:

Meet Cute: Nemesis

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I told this story on Twitter recently, and doing so in just 3 tweets reminded me how much fun it is. 

First! Definitions.

Meet Cute. The moment in a film or book (or real life) when love interests meet for the first time, usually in a cute or slightly unrealistic way. The terms can be used more broadly for any two significant characters meeting for the first time.

Examples: 

  • Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet are introduced at a ball and he insults her (Pride & Prejudice)
  • Rapunzel hits Flynn Rider over the head with a frying pan, knocking him out (Tangled)
  • Jane Foster hits Thor with her van, then must take him to the hospital (Thor) 

Nemesis. They don’t necessarily hate each other, but they are rivals in all things. 

Examples: 

  • Thor and Loki (Marvel Cinematic Universe)
  • Harry Potter and Cedric Diggory (Goblet of Fire)
  • Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty (Sherlock Holmes)

Now, to the story of the meet cute with my first nemesis.

On my first day of kindergarten, I and the rest of my class were lined up alphabetically by first name. Directly before me was a boy named Jeremy. This line determined our seats and line order for the rest of the year (and, because our teachers were a little unimaginative, the next two years as well). Jeremy and I sat down next to each other and said hi. He seemed quiet and nice. He liked dinosaurs, but not as much as Bran, who really loved dinosaurs. I liked dinosaurs okay, but I wanted some girls to be friends with. I thought Jeremy and I would be friends. 

I soon learned that Jeremy and I made the top grades in the class. In true Ravenclaw fashion, I’d already decided that good grades would be my thing. I could not be outdone. Not long after, Jeremy broke the rules and talked during class to whisper-ask me how to spell giraffe, which to be honest I still struggle with. I hissed back that he should sound it out. And then I caught him looked at my paper, probably because it was a really confusing lesson and we were both on the wrong page.

That was it! Getting good grades, breaking the rules, and trying to cheat? Three strikes. This kid was now my nemesis.

And I kind of liked him. He had dark hair and he was nice and I liked that he was quiet too. I was painfully shy, but I didn’t feel like I was fading away or being eclipsed when I was around him. Plus, dinosaurs are pretty cool. I liked science. His favorite TV show was Kratt’s Creatures, which was my second favorite show after Wishbone. And yes, I remember how cosmically important I found this information when I learned it due to a class project in second grade. 

The one day in first grade when Jeremy and Bran invited me to play with them on the playground, a bee flew up my pants leg on the swings and stung me twice on the underside of my knee. I had to go to the office and get an ice pack while trying not to cry in front of everyone. They didn’t ask me to play with them again, and I didn’t ask. The universe had already decided: we were nemeses. No crossing of the streams.

Jeremy and I competed against each other from seats directly beside or in front of one another for two and a half years, until I transferred to another school. I went on to have many more nemeses, but Jeremy was my first. 

Fast forward to the summer after my freshman year of college when a bunch of my friends and a bunch of their friends all met up at the drive-in (yes, really) to see Toy Story 3. We’d grown up with the first two movies, so this would be great! So fun! Not heartbreaking at all.

We hung out at the concession stand and amidst everyone’s cars, seeing people we hadn’t seen all year and meeting their friends whom we didn’t know. When the movie started, we mostly ended up crowded on sleeping bags in the backs of the 2 pick-up trucks with the tailgates down. I hit it off with this one guy with dark hair. We sat next to each other, chatted, ugly cried at the end of the movie and tried to hide it—it was great. My friend kept giving me a thumbs up when his back was turned, and discretely distracted people who also wanted to talk to us.

That night after we all went home to tend out mosquito bites and cuddle our childhood toys, the guy found me on Facebook and sent me a message. When I saw his last name, my excitement was immediately replaced with stone-cold dread. I knew that name. 

“Uh oh,” he wrote, “I think we were elementary school rivals.”

It was him. Jeremy. Nemesis #1. He’d found me.

Except, there was no reason to be nemeses now.

“It’s YOU,” I messaged back. “You were my first nemesis! I thought you looked familiar.”

“Yup. We were the original Pepsi and Coke. So how have you been?”

He had a girlfriend. 

So close, universe. So close. 

Hurricane Prep

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In the summers when I was growing up, my mom always kept several gallons of bottled water on the floor of the guest bathroom. During bad years, the bottles would duplicate and selections of canned food would work their way into towers alongside. Many years, I found myself on my hands and knees, reorganizing these nonperishables against the wall to make room for more. Thankfully, we almost never needed them. But every hurricane season, Mom took the extra oil for her hurricane lamp and the water in the guest bathroom seriously. Today, she’s evacuating from Dorian.

We always evacuated growing up. The Atlantic was very active in those years, and Mom always said that we were blessed to live in a beautiful place and blessed to live in a time with technology that told us when to evacuate. One season, we evacuated five times. We kept all our family photos in a single backpack and my brother and I each kept a huge box of toys in the living room, ready to be sealed and loaded up as soon as the governor gave the evacuation order. I learned to read maps on the evacuation route. I learned latitude and longitude as we tracked the latest storm locations on a family map with a green Expo marker. Our schools built hurricane days into the calendar instead of snow days. 

Because these memories were so common in my childhood, and our home always survived, many of them are fond ones. I loved putting puzzles together by the light of Mom’s oil lamp. I loved the rumble of thunder and watching the lightning flash outside as we watched a movie, all of us safe and cozy inside. I loved charting the hurricane’s new path and getting to ride up front with my mom, controlling the walkie-talkies while my brother and dad rode in the car behind.

Thankfully, we always had somewhere to evacuate to (grandparents’ house) and a mostly backroads route to get there. We didn’t have to drive for 24 hours like one classmate when evacuating from Floyd. We didn’t have to call ahead and ahead and ahead, praying for a hotel room, praying for a place that takes pets. We didn’t have to sleep in our cars outside a Walmart, where we could go in and use the bathroom 24 hours a day. We did sit in line for half an hour to fill up with gas. We did leave everything behind, wondering if we’d ever see it again. We did take refugees from Katrina and other massive storms into our schools and church and community. 

As an adult living inland, my relationship with hurricanes is different. During Irma, we lost power for 4 days, and it got cold and dark and no number of candles were as good as a lantern so I bought a lantern. I could take a hot shower, but only by candlelight. The house was so dark, the neighborhood so quiet, and I desperately missed my roommate and Tyler. I would have abandoned the house to sleep on a friend’s sofa if I hadn’t had my roommate’s dog with me. Even after the rain passed and my roommate got to come home, the nights were mostly long and miserable and the days were crowded and stressful.

In light of Hurricane Dorian’s trek through the Atlantic, I decided to pull together my hurricane stores over Labor Day. This required some digging through our many moving boxes for the supplies I’d somewhat haphazardly packed away, vastly overestimating how quickly I’d be unpacking and underestimating how soon I’d need these items.

I already had gallons of bottled water and canned food stored for us and our cat, as per my mother’s example. But I needed to find lighters, batteries, candles, our battery-operated lantern, and our phone-charging battery packs. My search was somewhat successful (the lantern remains elusive, but we bought a spare). We caught up on laundry and texted with friends who might need a place to stay. I watched the radar and checked on friends who live in places Dorian’s already devastated. We aren’t expecting any rain from this storm, but I’m still filling up with gas, going to the grocery store one more time, and checking on Mom’s progress to the place where she’ll wait until it’s safe to return home. And I’m thinking eastward thoughts toward Dorian. 

What kind of prep do you do for hurricanes? Do you have any good memories associated with hurricanes?